As football fans descend on Germany, the country's leaders are hoping that the World Cup will boost its economy and its image - at home as well as abroad, writes Derek Scally
On a sunny morning last month, a group of men dangling 230m above Berlin put the finishing touches to Germany's most striking World Cup landmark. For five months they braved subzero temperatures and icy winds, clambering around the top of the communist-era television tower on Alexanderplatz. As wide-eyed Berliners looked on, the men covered the 8,000 copper-coloured panes of the sphere at the top of the tower with space-age tinfoil. The result of their efforts will greet the millions of football fans who arrive in Berlin this week: an enormous football, visible from everywhere in the capital.
The last time Berlin hosted the World Cup final, in 1974, the television tower, then just five years old, was a distant sight across the cold-war divide, half-hidden in the smog of East Berlin. Now it's a spectacular showpiece for a tournament that is so much more than a game.
Like other World Cup hosts, Germany can expect a huge economic boost from what will probably be the final World Cup in Europe for 20 years. There is also growing confidence that the German side can repeat the success of 1974 and win the title in front of a home crowd. But there is another quiet hope for this World Cup: the chance of finally being able to celebrate Germany.
The road to this year's tournament begins and ends at the Olympic Stadium built to host the 1936 games, in Nazi Berlin. From outside, the stadium looks as it did 70 years ago: an imposing white oval similar to the Colosseum, in Rome, with stone statues standing guard and two towers holding aloft the Olympic rings.
Inside, a €230 million renovation has brought the stadium up to World Cup standards and added a spectacular new roof. The changes rethink the stadium for the future while acknowledging its fascist history - an approach that in many ways mirrors Germany's preparations for the tournament.
"The history is here, the totality of the buildings is here. The whole Nazi landscape has not disappeared," says Prof Gunter Gebauer, of the Institute for Philosophy at Berlin's Free University. "The people who come will always ask where the Führer sat." For the record, the VIP bench survived the renovation, although no seat survives where Adolf Hitler watched Jesse Owens win four gold medals. "The Olympic Stadium is the most beautiful stadium in all of Germany. It's truly remarkable, and I'm so glad they've restored it," says Siegfried Eifrig. He is now 96; as a young man he carried the Olympic torch through the streets of Berlin to open the 1936 games. "Through the lost war and the Holocaust, we haven't become strong patriots like in other countries," says Eifrig, a sprightly man who ran a marathon every year until he turned 90.
There's no doubt a World Cup win would be a shot in the arm for Germany, where the general mood of the past few years has been nothing short of lethal. The country has a happy tradition of pessimism, going right back to the Thirty Years War, in the 17th century. But it has outdone itself in recent years, turning the eminently solvable economic and social problems into an existential crisis. Germany wasn't just in recession, it was the sick man of Europe, shamefully bringing up the economic rear in the EU because of an expensive workforce, overly generous welfare, 11 per cent unemployment and a unification process that was glibly written off as a €1.25 billion failure.
German publishers smelled a trend and rushed into print apocalyptic titles such as Germany on the Couch and Can Germany Be Saved? Things reached crisis point ahead of last September's election, with politicians of all hues painting the country's future in ever-bleaker colours. Angela Merkel, the leader of the Christian Democrats, took the top prize with her ridiculous claim, which she repeated daily for two months, that "Germany has never been in a worse state than today". Really? As long as you don't mention the war.
The poisonous public mood prompted the US academic Susan Neiman, head of the Einstein Forum, in Potsdam, to write the book Strangers See Things Differently, in which she posed a provocative question: "What if Germany is already in the middle of reinventing itself, but the process is only recognisable from afar?" Significant changes had come about during the Schröder era, she pointed out: a more relaxed approach to history, more liberal citizenship laws and a self-confident foreign policy culminating in a refusal to support the war in Iraq.
"So much of Germany's problem has to do with Germans' negative attitude," Neiman says. "There's something spoiled, frankly, about their inability to see the good here. Not appreciating what we have is a strange, sad piece of human nature, yet Germans seem particularly incapable of this."
But something odd has happened since election night, when voters forced the Christian Democrats to share power with their sworn enemies, the Social Democrats. Like magic, the poisonous political sniping has ceased and the doomsday tone in the newspapers has vanished. Just a week after the election, leading media companies launched a feel-good advertising campaign entitled "Du bist Deutschland" (You are Germany). It bombarded Germans with slogans such as "There's no speed limit on the German Autobahn, so get your foot off the brake."
Another campaign will present Germany to World Cup visitors as the "land of ideas", with huge polystyrene models of great German inventions in prominent places, such as a car at the Brandenburg Gate and a football boot near the Chancellery.
The campaigns have won some praise but merciless criticism, too; they were described by one newspaper as "an attempt to fumigate the public with optimism, as if socialism has risen again". Despite public resistance to state-sponsored good-mood propaganda, German publishers seem to have smelled a new trend and have done an about-face.
Exhibit A is We Germans, a collection of affectionate essays about Germany by Matthias Matussek, of Der Spiegel magazine, who is one of Germany's most entertaining firebrands. "Germany has every reason to celebrate itself. It's a strong, rich, politically stable democracy at the centre of Europe," he says.
This kind of patriotism is nothing remarkable in most countries, but Germany isn't most countries. Matussek describes his book as a "case for left-leaning patriotism" to break the monopoly of "right-wing dumbheads" and to help Germany weather the harsh winds of globalisation. "The time is right for this attitude," he says. "In a globalised world, nations compete with each other like brand names. And of course something like the World Cup always boosts the image of a country abroad."
Exhibit B is 100 Reasons to Love Germany, a coffee-table book celebrating everything from Riesling wine and Meissen porcelain to Dr Hauschka cosmetics and, with apologies to Harry Lime, the cuckoo clock. Florian Langenscheidt, its editor, calls for an "emotional turnaround" to put Germany's current problems and its troubled past in perspective. "Naturally, we were the most barbaric and inhuman nation on earth in the 1930s and 1940s, and we will always be ashamed of ourselves for that," he writes. "Nobody can or should be allowed to deny this. But a one-sided focus on this doesn't helps us further, nor does it help solve our complex problems."
The upbeat vibe has reached the German economy, too. After four bad years, the last months have seen a definite turnaround, with growth of 1.8 per cent forecast for this year. Unemployment is still high, at more than 10 per cent, but it's dropping month-on-month, and the World Cup is expected to create an extra 50,000 jobs. German business confidence is at a 15-year high, and business leaders anticipate a €9 billion windfall from the football bonanza, with each visitor expected to spend between €600 and €950.
The World Cup has prompted a small building boom, too: newstadiums have popped up around the country, including the stunning Allianz Arena, in Munich; Berlin's new main railway station, a vast palace of glass and steel, has just gone into commission.
Every kind of business is jumping on the World Cup bandwagon: mattress stores offer World Cup discounts, banks sell "World Cup credit" and an electrical superstore is offering €10 off purchases for every goal Germany scores - sudden-death penalties excluded. Adding to the cacophony are politicians and cultural commentators with half-baked opinions about how important it is that Germany perform well.
Not everyone is getting carried along by the hype. "It's nonsense to say that there are real economic implications if Germany becomes world champion," says the leading soccer writer Christian Biermann. "People make these vague psychological assessments, but whenever I ask them for any evidence, there's none."
Regardless of how the German side performs, the tournament will be a win-win situation for the country's sex industry. A short stroll from Berlin's Olympic Stadium, behind a tyre repair shop, is a new 40-room, three-storey "superbrothel" named Artemis. Customers pay a fee to enter the brothel - an eye-popping blend of gold fixtures and leopard print - where they can negotiate directly with self-employed prostitutes with no fear of pimps or police.
Prostitution is legal in Germany, and the country's 400,000 registered sex workers have social-security numbers, pay tax and can claim the dole like anyone else. "We're thinking of staying open around the clock during the month," says Egbert Krumeich, the brothel's manager. "I think we will have a lot more clients coming here, maybe 250 to 350 per day, but maybe as many as 500."
The slogan of this year's World Cup is "a time to make friends", prompting one Cologne brothel to advertise itself in an eight-storey poster as "a time to make girlfriends". But the World Cup hosts may be surprised to find out how many friends they already have who don't charge €80 for half an hour. In a recent survey, Germany was the only one of the 16 countries surveyed to underestimate rather than overestimate its popularity in the world.
Just 51 per cent of Germans believe they are liked in the world, the survey found, with 43 per cent sure they are disliked. But the survey placed Germany as the most popular western European country in the poll. Some 89 per cent of French people, 88 per cent of Dutch and even 75 per cent of Britons said they had a positive opinion of Germans. It is this goodwill that could turn the 2006 World Cup into a memorable moment for the country, like the 1954 World Cup victory, in Bern - seen as the founding moment of West Germany - or the 1990 win, which was the crowning achievement of a united Germany.
At the same time, it is a chance to overcome memories of the tragic 1972 Munich Olympics, which were stirred up by Steven Spielberg's recent film dramatisation.
The yellowing souvenir book of the 1936 Olympic Games describes the just-completed tournament, in a tragic mixture of hubris and optimism, as "the dawn of a new era of self-confidence free of the humiliation of the past".
Seventy years on, 96-year-old Siegfried Eifrig admits cautiously that, like many Germans, he is looking forward to what the World Cups brings to a united Germany. "Football is a game where every country lets the patriot out, everyone wants their country to win - Germany too," he says. "The decent people in this country are going to try to be good hosts, so that people can go home with a good feeling about Germany."
THE REAL GERMANY?
Germany is
Yellow all-weather anoraks
Talking about ideas
Punctual trains
Currywurst
Public nudity
Speaking foreign languages
Germany isn't
Lobster-red peeling skin
Talking about last night's telly
Delayed by a late incoming train
Batter burger
Public vomiting
Asking a foreign waiter: "What's ... the story with a bit of grub?"
EMERGENCY GERMAN
Zwei Bier, bitte - Two beers, please
Der war Abseits - He was offside
Einer geht noch rein - Room for one more (beer)
Ich liebe dieses Land - I love this country
Nein, aber mein Bruder hat ... rotes Haar - No, but my brother has ... red hair
Der Schiri ist ein Idiot - The referee is an idiot
Zu mir oder zu Dir? - Your place or mine?
Mir ist krank - I'm sick
Ich bin ein Berliner - I am a doughnut
REMARKS TO IMPRESS GERMANS WITH
Politics The grand coalition has really improved the tone of political discourse.
FIFA-bashing It's ridiculous the Allianz sign has to be removed from the Munich stadium just to keep the World Cup sponsors happy.
Economy I hear Germany's the world's leading exporter again.
Football I accept Franz Beckenbauer as my lord and saviour.
History Hitler was Austrian.
THEY QUALIFIED . . .FOREIGN FANS IN IRELAND
Czech Republic
Josef Havlas, Czech ambassador to Ireland, from Prague
"On June 12th, for the game against the USA, I hope to be watching at home. As a diplomat I have to wish all the teams well, but as a fan I firmly believe we will get to the final."
Chant: Do toho! (Go!).
Kick-off: June 12th, versus USA.
Poland
Marcin Malicka from Warsaw
"We will go to some of the Dublin pubs. It'd be nice to watch the game with compatriots. Sometimes we play surprisingly. We lose to teams that are not that good but win against teams that are strong."
Chant: Polska bialo-czerwoni! (Poland red and white!).
Kick-off: Friday, versus Ecuador.
Australia
Ray Avila from Wollongong
"Probably I'll be down in the Woolshed, on Parnell Street in Dublin, with all the other Aussies. Aussies aren't mad into their football, but they will be there because we're in it. When I was a kid we used to get bashed in the playground if we played football."
Chant: Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi!
Kick-off: June 12th, versus Japan.
United States
David Jesse, managing director of Ebay.ie, from Minneapolis
"I'll try to get to the pub - not necessarily to be with other Americans, it's just better for atmosphere. The US have a better team than in 2002 but a hard group. I think their chances are 50-50."
Chant: USA, USA, USA!
Kick-off: June 12th, versus Czech Republic.
Spain
Ruben Beréz, from Madrid
"I like to watch the games by myself. I don't believe they are going to do well, because they don't play with heart. They play really well for Real Madrid or Barcelona, but not for Spain."
Chant: Olé, olé, olé!
Kick-off: June 14th, versus Ukraine.
England
James Helm, BBC Dublin correspondent, from North Yorkshire
"I'll watch wherever I can - maybe in a pub in town with a few friends, Irish and English, if I can brave it. Without Rooney our chances are lower, obviously. If I expect the worst - the usual departure via a penalty shoot-out - then maybe I'll get a surprise.
Chant: Eng-er-land, Eng-er-land!
Kick off: Next Saturday, versus Paraguay.
LUKE O'NEILL